> Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives.

AnthonyMouse didn't say otherwise. This is a non-sequitur.

> free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.

In this case, yes, that's the theory. The problem is that there is no meaningful evidence to support the notion that incentives are affected in this way by the effective elimination of copyright or patent monopolies. Consider, for instance, the fashion industry -- specifically a no-fly-zone for patents and copyrights, but highly active and very lucrative for successful firms. More interestingly, it pays the designers, the actually "artists" of the industry, far more consistently than some copyright industries (e.g. record industry) and far with far more significant high-end payouts for top performers than other copyright industries (e.g. software development).

As statistics in Falkvinge's article show, however, the consistency across the field has been increasing in the record industry since the advent of Napster, thanks to such effects as increased directness of the business relationship between the artist and the consumer (bypassing the copyright dependent record industry infrastructure). Meanwhile, the watermark for top performer income in software development is also rising thanks to the rise of business models independent of copyright protections, such as served by facilitators like Kickstarter and Humble Bundle and the growth of foundations supported by voluntary donations that fund open source projects.

> It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?

Yes, absolutely. There. Asked and answered.

> BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project.

This is no more accurate than your statement that Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of copyright and patent law. UNIX was originally created by software developers within AT&T Bell Labs, in part to scratch an organizational internal itch, and made available for free to universities; BSD Unix was originally created as what amounted to a patchset by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley to serve his own desire to work on the project.

It wasn't until after the third major version of BSD Unix (3BSD) was created that DARPA funding related to the project appeared at all. This funding guided the direction of BSD Unix development for the 4BSD release, of course, but given the history of the previous three versions it seems ludicrous to suggest that without DARPA interest the BSD Unix project would have suddenly evaporated and we would never have a publicly accessible BSD Unix. You are, for some reason, seeing the existence of DARPA funding at a late stage of UC Berkeley involvement in Unix development as some kind of evidence that DARPA funding was a necessary precondition for the existence and continued development of BSD Unix, which is a wholly unwarranted conclusion.

Subsequent to meeting the DARPA-directed goals of 4BSD, development went back to what it had been before: largely Bill Joy scratching an itch. 4.1BSD was essentially the result of him tinkering with kernel performance. While DARPA still kept its hand in things, it basically served as bureaucratic overhead, which the developers accepted because their parent organizations received what amounted to bribes. To suggest that somehow BSD Unix would not have existed without DARPA funding is just laughably without supporting evidence. It's like saying that without Avatar there never would have been 3D movies. S Cameron's movie represented a huge influx of capital into the 3D movie industry, and it suddenly looked like 3D movies were the future, but after the hype waned the result is that a lot of people realize that 3D is not magic fairy dust that automatically makes movies Better. They further realized that 3D movie technologies and techniques were actually progressing for a long time leading up to that moment when conditions were right for someone to take advantage of a confluence of factors to create a big-budget, very popular 3D movie. James Cameron, it could be argued, was just in the right place at the right time, and as a result he got credit in the history of 3D movies far out of proportion to his actual contribution -- just like DARPA in the development of BSD Unix according to your version of history.

> Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches.

It's funny how you take a strong argument against the necessity of copyright, turn it around, and present it as though it's some kind of argument for copyright. No, it doesn't work like that; the Linux kernel and the huge communities that have arisen around it all add up to a gigantic counterargument for the notion that we wouldn't have useful operating systems without copyright.

> Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did?

With greater interest, in the absence of a market-dominating monopolist, I'm sure it would have served the home computer user market far better than MS Windows did in the real world. After all, MS Windows is the result of push-marketing, where a huge corporation decides what it will sell based on its judgments of the most "efficient" production methods for its purposes, then spends ungodly amounts of money on marketing to convince people that's what they want to acquire. By contrast, open source OS projects serve the actual interests -- the economic demand -- of actual users. The fact that Microsoft has effectively muscled the lion's share of competition out of the market through means largely unrelated to directly competitive provision of quality limits the actual sources of market inputs to the development plans of other OS developers so that they tend to focus on narrower target audiences; the narrower target audience influence on their development is thus in part a result of the existence of MS Windows, and not a natural state of affairs that ensures BSD Unix projects could never serve the same user demographics as MS Windows.

You're not talking about what would realistically happen in the absence of copyright, in other words. You're just talking about what happens if you remove a copyright-dependent organization and assume nothing else would change, which is quite unrealistic.

As for your assertions about smartphone support, icebraining responded to thats, I'll stop producing Wall Of Text.